boil the ocean

It requires a certain steeliness of nerve, a never-look-down style of confidence, to trundle off to market in this bold Year of the Capybara with a wagonload of minimal suede uppers and vulcan soles, seeking purchase and fingerholds upon shoe walls heavy-laden with stay-puft ’90s boots and eBay-ready $150 MSRP limited editions. Just so, Sole Tech’s Emerica this week shows itself to be similarly unshook to point the stalwart footwear concern’s perennially green-tinted lens 180 degrees away from the prevailing stand-and-zoom, face-shoes-face treatment of the modern patterned pants wearers and curb bashers, uploading ‘There’s So Much More,’ a super heavy solo part from tentpole teamrider Dakota Servold, stretched to a feature-length 10 minute runtime.

Here, the feature in question calls back to a certain high-gloss production freighted with snippets of worldly observations, funded by White Pages-scale advertising revenues and coated in creamy atmospherics and b-roll. Whereas energetic beverage conglomerate Red Bull GmbH five years ago conjured the Transworld video spirit for its handrail-drizzled ‘U Good?’, its slow-mo and trip-hop accoutrements lacked much in the way of verbal introspection by the likes of Jamie Foy and Alex Midler. Matt Gotwig generated a fine approximation with his 2021 ‘Birds’ part that came complete with Atiba Jefferson bleep-bloop credits music supervision, but no voiceover; Neils Bennett’s ‘Heroes/Helden’ last year got closer still, dipping into the soul music archives and recruiting Mike Carroll for a brief voiceover.

One benefit of the full-production treatment is that Dakota Servold’s tricks are given lots of room to breathe, with lengthy takes and various angles and little filler, and unlike other multi-song epics such as Marc Johnson in ‘Fully Flared’ or Mark Suciu’s ‘Verso,’ this one doesn’t easily divide into chapters. Dakota Servold rummages pretty deep to pull out some pretty wild clips like the frontside bluntslide all the way through the Robert Frost Middle School kinks, the 50-50 up to frontside bluntslide 180 to switch 50-50 down, or that pole jam out to crooked grind down the rail toward the end.